


A Bouquet of Tongues

by Cards_Slash



Series: Second Verse [2]
Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:27:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22700224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: Bobo had been behaving himself like the rules on the door described.  His hands had been resting on the sticky vinyl seats since Tiffany crawled into his lap.  But he stretched his body out beneath her, smiling across her shimmering shoulder at Doc’s insufferably furious face.  He crossed his arms behind his head just to see how it made the man twitch.  “After I was such a gentleman to you,” he said.“We have a very different recollection of events if you are qualifying any of your behavior as gentlemanly.”
Relationships: Doc Holliday/Bobo Del Rey | Robert Svane
Series: Second Verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1632727
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	A Bouquet of Tongues

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on tumblr at [BewareofChris](https://bewareofchris.tumblr.com/) help me scream about this pairing. :D

For all the modern conveniences of this modern world, things had not changed. The exterior of the thing had changed. Horses had become _automobiles_. Trains had given way to _planes_. Photographs had become _videos_. 

But the things that _mattered_ , those hadn’t changed a bit. Men were every bit as gullible in this glorious new time as they had been when they were shouting death threats at him over poker tables back _then_. Doc was filled up with just enough meanness to find joy in separating a fool from his money. 

Liquor was still quicker; still sold in glass bottles across brown wood counters. 

Sure, the modern world had _conveniences_. He’d spent an hour in a grocery store, trying to wrap his head around the unnecessary variety of modern _conveniences_. All a man needed to feed himself in his day was the willingness to do a little work, a bit of wood, and a weapon sharp enough to do the job. 

(Or, in Doc’s case, a smile charming enough to talk a pretty woman into a hot meal and a warm bed.)

Doc wasn’t in the mood for the modern world. He wasn’t meant to be kept in small spaces made by modern walls. He didn’t want to be caught inside, surrounded by a crush of unknown bodies full of nonsense talk of nonsense things. And they were full of things to talk about. Every man was a scholar with a cell phone, willing to explain to you exactly why you were wrong about something or another. They were belligerent with knowledge, fattened up on thinking that men didn’t just go around shooting each other in the street anymore.

No, Doc wanted the endlessness of open air. He was willing to build a fire and shoot his own dinner if it meant he could find a little bit of infinity under the open sky. 

There had been more shelter at Bobo’s smelly RV park but there had been _less_ safety. Certainly, despite the nature of the men that resided there, a certain kinship could be felt with men who had always found themselves an unmoving bit of history in this modern world. Some of the revenants had a starved-and-desperate stare when they looked at him; like they’d been waiting a hundred and thirty years to lay eyes on something that reminded them of home.

(And there were men like Bobo Del Rey that looked at him like something to be _consumed_. That couldn’t decide with their eyes if they hated what they were looking at and didn’t know what to do with their God-damn mouths long before they opened them.)

Doc wanted peace.

The most he managed was a limp tent and a little fire. He was leaning against a rock he’d picked for its size and suitability, sipping his well-earned liquor as the sun sank so low in the sky it stole the warmth from the air. The dark was bad for a man with a little too much liquor in his belly and a few too many bite marks on his neck. 

Still, it would have taken a good deal more than a half a bottle of whiskey and a handful of morose thoughts to keep him from noticing the snapping footsteps of uninvited guests. They brought a gust of foul wind with them, like a breeze sweeping the unwashed stink of their rotting flesh right into Doc’s face. 

He took a drink to all the smart men that must have known better than to settle in a place like Purgatory. His eyes slid closed with the burn of the liquor on his throat, and he almost fooled himself into thinking those footsteps weren’t getting a little more giddy as they got a little closer. 

“What’d I tell you, what’d I tell you? Right where I said he was.”

Nothing made a man more of a God-damn idiot than an audience. Doc opened his eyes and set his liquor well out of the way of what was certain to be a scuffle. He tipped his head back as he put his hand on his gun, “can I help you gentleman with something?”

One of them was as thin as a reed; as up and down as a telephone pole. He was made of bones with oily skin stretched so tight across it that seemed to be in danger of snapping. His curled lips were pulled back over yellowed teeth but his _eyes_ were deep black pits. His answer was a shrill laugh that jingled the unnecessary number of buckles hanging off his leather jacket.

“We want the Bobo special,” said the stouter of his two intruders. He was tough shit in dirty khaki’s, with fingers fat as sausages hanging off his skinny arms. The whole of his body seemed to have been assembled out of a spare parts bin, alternating between thin and fat. His face, even as joyful as it was, was just plain ugly.

Doc was not a man to forget a face, certainly not one that could have curdled fresh cream. He cleared his throat, “you will have to explain to me what that is supposed to mean, _Willard_. I am not as up-to-date on modern terminology as I once was.”

The unfortunate skinny man shrieked with fresh laughter. He’d stalked a path around the end of the tent to close the gap between the pair of them. It was nice how they’d lined themselves up like targets on a post. “You know this one,” the skeleton said, “you invented it.”

Willard was rubbing a hand up and down his gut in a way that suggested nothing Doc wanted to spend a moment thinking about. His mouth was hanging open like a dog’s and his fat pink tongue was licking his chops just the same. His eyes were glowing red in the dying light and his voice was it’s own special pit of hell. “We all know what you did, so you can just take your hand off those guns.”

“I really do not think I will,” Doc assured him. 

The skinny man stumbled forward with a shiver of excitement, “let me go first,” he said in a great rush of noise. His fingers were curved as claws, reaching out to grab for Doc’s boots. He never even saw the gun pointed at his head, so he damn sure didn’t see the bullet that buried itself between his eyes. 

“God damn it, Lars,” Willard snapped as he jumped backward. He didn’t have the good sense to put his hands up in defeat, much like his momentarily incapacitated friend did not have the good sense to keep his hands to himself. 

Doc rolled to his feet, pulled his second gun from the belt as he went because as good as one gun could be to bring a bad conversation to a quick end, two guns just made a man feel better. “You _are_ going to explain to me what the _hell_ you are talking about.”

Willard had never been a smart man but he’d always been a vicious one. Wyatt had never had any patience for the sort of man that couldn’t respect a woman, and old Willard had never met a woman he had not wanted to defile. Even now, facing down the barrel of two guns, he was too busy salivating over the ideas that had brought him to this end to worry himself with mortal panic. “I already told you, _Holliday_ ,” that was the filthiest sounding intonation of his name to date. “ _Everyone_ knows what you did. We know how you bent over for Bobo.”

Perhaps it had been too much to hope that a gentleman’s agreement could have been kept between the gentleman who had made it. (Maybe he ought to have considered that neither he nor Bobo Del Rey could be considered gentleman in even the loosest definition of the word.) “Did Bobo tell you that?”

Willard’s laugh was a wheeze. “He fucked you in that RV just like it says on the door, just like a bitch.” There was slobber on the edges of his mouth, a line of drool threatening to spill over the roundest part of his mouth. Willard took a step forward with a growling laugh. “Now you’re fair game, aren’t you? _Nobody_ ’s protecting you now.”

“I do not require anyone’s protection but my own, Willard.”

But Willard was laughing as Doc pulled back the hammer on the gun. He was going to shoot the man until his face was a bloody hole and Willard was just _laughing_. 

Doc was caught in a moment of brilliant white rage, filled up with nothing but the gagging sound of this man’s foul suggestions. He could be forgiven for missing the approach of a coward sneaking up behind him. There was no sound to warn him before his hair was pulled so sharply that his head was yanked skyward. His fingers squeezed the trigger but his aim was compromised by the sudden appearance of a very sharp, and very familiar knife pressed across his throat.

“Why’d you have to make it so difficult, Doc?” That was not the voice of a man that Doc recognized, so he did not have a name for the person that he was going to _kill_ first. “You don’t have to pretend with us.” There was a dead man’s tongue pressed flat and dragging up the length of Doc’s throat. 

“I think you may have been misinformed about the nature of the arrangement between Bobo Del Rey and myself,” he ground out. His mouth couldn’t close far enough to grit his teeth, and he couldn’t twist his head far enough to see where Willard’s unpleasantly greasy body had moved to. 

No guesswork was required as to the particular goal these gentlemen shared. They had come with the presumption of taking a piece of Bobo’s pie. The mistake they had made was that Doc was not a pie and that Bobo could not have claimed ownership of him even if he were. Doc set his aim where the body of an idiot would be standing and took a shot.

The howl of shock and _pain_ seemed to indicate that he had struck some part of the man, although not a momentarily fatal one. The knife at his throat slid across his skin like a kiss, and the dead man at his back gasped, “drop your guns!” as if he’d forgotten who he was talking to.

It required no aim at all to shoot a man in the head when he made himself so available to you. The sharpness of the shot so close to his own ear was more immediately painful to him than how the knife cut across his neck and shoulder as the dead man fell behind him. 

That pain, that great, bright, _hot_ ringing in his ear was _disorienting_. It made the world swimmy around him. It left him half-dead and howling. But it did not leave him blind, and Willard was far too big a target to miss. His first shot had struck the man in the leg, and he was sitting back on his flat ass grabbing the wound with both hands. 

“You son of a bitch!” Willard shouted at him. (He must have shouted it _very_ loudly to be heard over the ringing in Doc’s ears.) “You can’t kill us,” he hissed, “we’ll be back.”

Well. 

Wasn’t that the best news that Doc had heard all day? There was nothing more satisfying to say than pulling the trigger and splattering this foul bastard’s brains across the grass. And doing it once was only as moderately satisfying as doing it twice, and if Doc was going to shoot a dead horse twice, he might as well shoot it three times. He spared an extra bullet for the skinny skeleton that had started to twitch the side, and that left at least one more for the dead man who had stolen his knife.

\--

The woman had called herself Tiffany but it rang about as true as a lead bell. It didn’t matter much to _him_ what she wanted to be called. They were a fine set of liars, calling themselves names that didn’t fit, wearing costumes like armor. Tiffany was paying the bills being the center of attention, smiling at him like he had a bank in his back pocket. 

_Still_ , there was a perfect, momentary distraction to be had in leaning back into the slick vinyl booth and _watching_ her work. Bobo hadn’t come to strip joint for philosophy; he’d come to be another body in a crowd. To fill up his brain with anything that didn’t involve dirt, bones or utter morons. He was working off the aggravation of another God-damn Earp heir that couldn’t understand he didn’t want anything to do with her just as much as she wanted nothing to do with him.

That was the trouble with Earps; the whole world had to revolve around them.

Tiffany didn’t suffer from the delusion that he was going to care about her for longer than it took for her to make a few bucks and move on. She was poised over him, with one hand drawing his attention to perfectly pert tits and the other in her own thick-blonde hair. She was working a short con, gyrating her hips just over his, blurring that line between fantasy and reality. 

“Sweetheart,” said a man who had announced that he had every intention of joining forces with whatever Earp would have him, “your evening would be much improved if you were to move on from this particular man as he will prove to be even more disappointing than expected.”

Tiffany was caught between the idea of getting extra tips and lick of a real threat in those outdated words. She hadn’t stopped the roll of her hips, but she had turned her head to look at Doc fucking Holliday standing there like he was a museum piece. “Sorry, you’ll have to wait your turn.”

Doc’s smile was all forgiveness laced with violence. His hands were resting on the guns at his hips in a way that might have meant one hell of a gunfight a century ago.

“That’s right, _Henry_ ,” Bobo said, “you’ll have to wait.” 

“I don’t believe that I do, _Bobo_.”

Bobo had been behaving himself like the rules on the door described. His hands had been resting on the sticky vinyl seats since Tiffany crawled into his lap. But he stretched his body out beneath her, smiling across her shimmering shoulder at Doc’s insufferably furious face. He crossed his arms behind his head just to see how it made the man _twitch_. “After I was such a gentleman to you,” he said.

“We have a very different recollection of events if you are qualifying any of your behavior as gentlemanly.” He moved a hand off his gun to thrust it into his pocket and pulled out a slimy, wet streak of meat.

“Is that a tongue?” Tiffany hissed. She fell over in her haste to escape and the panicked-pitch of her voice drew the unwanted attention of men just trying to enjoy themselves.

“It’s a prop,” Bobo growled. He fished a few dollars out of his coat pocket to drop in her lap as she tried to straighten herself up on the slippery seat. “He’s a little dramatic.” 

Bobo didn’t need to explain a God-damn thing he did to anyone in this building. He’d known the family that owned it since their grandmother was a child, and he’d made enough of an impression on every generation to make sure that nobody asked a single question about the unsavory sort of things they might see happening around him. Doc showing up with a fistful of tongue was the most notable occurrence in years but it had nothing on the time one of his less discrete brethren had buried three-fourths of a beer bottle in his brother’s face. 

No, Bobo didn’t waste his time offering explanations that were lies at best. People were people, they would forget out of self-preservation or act like they’d never seen it to start with. He grabbed Doc by the arm and shoved him toward the inky-black corner. There was a neon arrow announcing the presence of bathrooms that only the truly desperate man thought to use. 

The smell took you first, the futile fumes of poured bleach, the stink of urine and semen and human shit. There was a mirror lit up like a Christmas tree, twice as bright as an airport runway. Doc pulled his gun as soon as they were around the corner, twisted in Bobo’s grip to shove them both against the nearest wall. The barrel of his gun was wedged so deeply into Bobo’s jaw he couldn’t get his mouth open farther than he needed to smile. 

“Whose tongues did you bring me?” he hissed through his teeth.

“Like you are not aware.”

Doc was a man with a temper and Bobo had never been on the best side of it. But he’d never been shoved into a wall by a man that seemed _as likely_ to kill him as this one. Not even the Earps that had sent him to hell had looked at him with the sort of murder that was filling up Doc Holliday’s eyes. 

“I’m getting mixed signals, Henry,” he grit out through his teeth. “You bring me gifts, you put a gun to my face.”

Now _that_ was a new look for Doc’s face, the outrage was so completely honest that it must have shocked the man himself. He was whispering, “you _do not_ know,” as if it were a thought so unbelievable he could barely bring himself to say it. 

Bobo took advantage of the momentary distraction. It gave him just enough space to pluck the oozing tongue out Doc’s fist. The gun at his neck slid down but not away and Doc was left glaring at him with a curled lip of disgust. (Bobo had half a plan to eat the damn thing just to see what kind of face Doc would make about that.) He sniffed it, “well, Willard was never my favorite.” He dropped the tongue in the sink to the side. “Let’s see what we think Willard might have done to piss you off? There’s so many options.”

“I am certain that were I to pull this trigger, the sound of the shot would be sufficiently silenced by the unnecessary amount of fur you are wearing,” Doc hissed at him.

If Bobo had known that fucking the man was going to make him take everything _personally_ , he might not have bothered. Doc was a bowstring, plucked the point of snapping, and Bobo was grinning at him just to see what he’d do. His hand ran down the Doc’s coat to the opening of his damp pocket and when he sank his fingers inside he found _more_ tongues. “Let’s see who else was with ole Willard.”

Doc stepped back so he could straighten his arm. He was pressing the gun against Bobo’s forehead with a sneer on his face, working up to pulling the trigger. 

Bobo didn’t need to so much as look at the tongues in his hand to know who they belonged to. Willard was reliably stupid, but he was a loyal stupid and he inspired the same vile loyalty in the only men that would consider themselves his friends. And there wasn’t a lot that man could do to John Henry that would move him to the sort of _unsettled_ fury that was so prominently on display before him. 

Hell had given Bobo a throat made for growling; that was fair when it had skinned him alive and filled him up with liquid fire. Hell made him an _animal_. He could feel it rumbling in his chest as he tipped his body forward against the smooth metal of Doc’s gun. “Tell me,” he snarled. He grabbed the gun with one hand and reached out to pull Doc forward with the other. “How far did they get?”

Doc couldn’t shoot him when he couldn’t move the gun, and he couldn’t get to the other one without letting go of his grip on Bobo’s wrist. But he had a knife that worked well in _up-close_ situations like this. The sharp edge of it slicked through Bobo’s shirt like a caress but it bit into his skin like a sting. A fresh, cold pain spreading along the rise of his rib toward his heart. Getting stabbed in the heart wouldn’t kill him, but it wasn’t a _pleasant_ sensation nonetheless.

“It is bad enough,” Doc hissed at him, “that I had to suffer through that mockery of sex without having to be _accosted_ by your lackeys acting under the misguided impression that I am available to be _used_.” 

Well, wasn’t that just like _Willard?_

“Well, if they knew how difficult you were to fuck they wouldn’t try,” Bobo said. The fact that they shouldn’t have tried at all was no fact that needed to be shared. The fact that they _had_ was most definitely a fact that needed addressing. Bobo let go of Doc’s gun and tossed it into the sink with the slimy brown tongue melting into the drain. “Where,” he said with a purr rumbling out of the center of his chest, not so far from where the knife was resting, “should I look for their bodies?”

“Difficult?” Was not the important part of what Bobo had just said. It certainly wasn’t the part he had expected Doc to repeat. But he stepped just far enough back to wipe his knife clean on Bobo’s coat as he said it. “Maybe I would not have been as _difficult_ if you had any notion about how to treat a man. As for the corpses of your _associates_ , I suggest you look for the largest convergence of carrion eaters.” 

Doc ducked to the side to pick up his gun. 

Bobo was looking at the tongues in the sink as Doc was walking away, but he said, “I didn’t tell them,” and he couldn’t quite figure out why it mattered enough to say.

\--

Doc found himself in need of a place to sleep with a reliable reputation, but he was unfortunate to have such a need without having any method of filling it. Still, a man such as himself had a number of methods of securing a suitable place to rest his head. While he could have seduced his way into a bed or swindled enough cash to buy one for himself, he was not in the proper mindset for either. 

That left him a number of options, but opted for the one that was both simplest and nearest to him. That was to say, he walked into the local police station with a mostly empty bottle of liquor that he promptly smashed on the countertop. He let his voice get long, and thick and syrupy so all his words turned to something like water. 

“I need a bed,” he shouted at the white-faced child that was staffing the counter for the evening.

It may have been too much effect for the young man. He had the look of someone who was as likely to start crying as he was to put Doc in a jail cell. “Sir,” the child said, “this isn’t a hotel.”

Doc pulled a gun but very slowly. Not slowly enough for the young man to react with any speed, but slowly enough that he didn’t send him running off to cry in a closet. 

“Sir,” the deputy (or what passed for it after work hours, apparently) said. He fumbled with his own sidearm so that, if this had been a real contest, he would have been dead before he realized he was even in danger. “Sir, put the gun on the counter.” 

“I need a bed,” Doc repeated. He dropped the gun on the counter well out of the spread of the spill of liquor and broken glass. 

“Right,” the deputy said, “right, I’ll put you in a cell.”

The poor bastard did not even attempt to Doc’s second gun, or his knife, or his coat, or check him for any further weapons. He did nothing at all but guide him into a room with a set of bars and a concrete bed. When the bars were closed and the lock engaged, the deputy ran for his life.

That was just as well, because the room was warm and Doc had taken the precaution of securing a second (sadly smaller) bottle of liquor that he planned to use as a sleeping aid. He made himself a pillow out of his coat, settled onto his back as comfortably as a man could under the present circumstances, and drank himself to sleep.

The only trouble with falling asleep drunk was waking up hungover. 

And he did, wake up, _hungover_. He woke up rolled onto his belly with one of his arms hanging off the side of his miserable concrete bed. The slant of his shoulders put an uncomfortable level of pressure on the still raw wound across his neck and shoulder. It was singing like a fire-brand, making waking up as unpleasant as possible. 

He woke up with his face pillowed on the knobby bones of his own hand to the sight of Wynonna Earp smirking at him through a thick set of bars. _She_ was eating a powdery white doughnut and holding a cup of coffee that was so hot it was still steaming. “If you needed a place to sleep, you could have said something.” 

Wyatt had had that same manner of smirking. That smugness that somehow managed to be endearing. It had been as _intolerable_ to Doc’s hangover then as it was now. But Wynonna Earp gently balanced her doughnut on top of her coffee so she could pull Doc’s gun out of the waistband of her jeans. 

“Nedley told me they used to have security cameras in this place, I would _pay_ to watch you smash a bottle on the counter.” She was looking at the gun, and not at him, amusing herself with whatever story had been told about him now.

That _was_ a problem that he would have to resolve, somehow. All these stories that were being told about him. He did not care for the implications. 

“Dolls thinks we should keep you in here.”

“Well that is not surprising to me,” Doc said. He had managed to get his limbs cooperating long enough to sit up and his aching head seemed to indicate that he shouldn’t have bothered. “If that is your intention, I would like to request a cup of coffee and a trip to the facilities.”

“Facilities,” Wynonna scoffed. But she pushed his gun through the bars until he dragged himself up to take it from her. “He’s coming to let you out. We got a package with your name on it.” 

“Package?” Doc repeated.

“Oh yeah,” was the only answer he was given. 

Deputy Marshall Dolls did indeed come and open the bars that were holding him captive, but he seemed as if he would have preferred to lock the door and seal the room. His scowl was set even deeper into his mouth and forehead, and Doc simply did not have the internal reserve necessary to engage with the man. He followed where he was lead and found a cup of coffee waiting for him at the end.

Of course, there was also an unimpressively small cardboard box with troubling red-brown stains soaked through on all sides. There was no proper address written on the top, but a scrawl of black letters that read:

 _Henry_.

“There must be a number of men that share that moniker. Why has it been assumed that this box is intended for me?”

Dolls crossed his arms with more menace than was needed so early in the morning, but he did not have an answer.

“Well,” Wynonna said, “it was hand delivered, this morning, to the police station, where you just _happened_ to be sleeping. And it has _your_ name on it.” 

The box had not even been properly closed. There was a frayed string holding it closed on the top that allowed a cloud of unfortunately familiar stink to emanate from within. It was a smell very similar in type to how his pocket must still smell. Doc knew what was in the box even before he used the tip of his knife to slice through string keeping it closed. The lid blossomed opened like an overripe fruit split in the middle, setting loose an unholy smell that turned his still-recovering stomach.

Perched atop a slobbery pile of pink tongues was a piece of paper that read:

_They grew back._

Doc stabbed his knife through the end of one of the tongues and lifted it out of the box. It seemed that when they were removed for the second time, they had not been cut as was a more efficient method, but pulled until they had separated from the flesh of the throat.

Had he been in any other company, he might have been able to take some manner of satisfaction from knowing where these particular tongues had come from. However, Wynonna was gasping in horror at his side while Dolls shouted, “put that back in the box!”

“Someone sent you a box of tongues?” Wynonna shouted, “who would send you a box of tongues? Is that some old-time ‘sleeps with the fishes’ shit?”

Dolls appeared to be so offended by the discovery of body parts in a box clearly covered in blood that he slapped both hands on the top to snap it closed again. “I think you should answer the question, Henry.”

“That is not my name as far as you are concerned,” Doc said. He had to set his coffee down on the desk to wipe the knife clean before he could put it back in it’s sheathe. “I do not know why I was sent a box of tongues, Deputy Marshall Dolls. If I had to make _an_ assumption, I would guess that the sender was not happy about what was being said by the tongues he removed.”

“The blood is brown,” Wynonna said from the side, “so they’re revenant tongues. That’s better than _not_ revenant tongues.”

“I believe so,” Doc agreed.

Deputy Marshall Dolls’ did not agree. He did not believe that the tongues in the box were an indication of anything other than an imagined guilt on Doc’s part. He was as sure that they were proof that Doc was untrustworthy (and he was, to a certain extent) as Willard had been about getting what he wanted the night before. There was even an edge of the same lewd _implication_. Except Dolls didn’t have enough facts to churn out a thought as vile as the sort Willard was brewing. He had half a story, just enough to think he understood. “Unless they’re a _gift_.”

“Shitty gift,” Wynonna whispered. 

Dolls pulled the box across the table so he could flip open the flaps again. The slip of paper was crumpled into a corner but it was still in one piece. He pulled it out and flipped it around to show Wynonna. “What was it you said? _Someone_ didn’t like what they were saying?”

“I have already indicated that I do not have any further information about this box or the contents it contains.” (Except that he did.)

“So you haven’t cut out any revenant’s tongues?” Dolls said.

Wynonna must have been rolling her eyes to the side, as unimpressed by the standoff in front of her as any woman forced to witness the reckless pride of men. Her voice a flippant interruption of the start of a real ugly fight. “Did they insult your hat, Doc? Call you a cheat at cards? Come on, you can tell us.”

Dolls’ fury wasn’t going to give just because he lacked sufficient proof to call Doc all those names he was thinking behind his eyes.

But Doc didn’t need _Dolls_. He shifted on his feet, so he could turn his attention to Wynonna looking at him with some expectation that he play along with her joke. There was vulnerability in that fragile faith she was displaying in him. So he smiled at her, as charmingly as he could manage, “there are simply some things that you should not call a man. As for who might have sent me this _unwanted_ gift, I cannot say. I have severed my connection with the revenant population, and I did not leave any friends when I did so.”

“See?” Wynonna said. She balled up the slip of paper in her fist and dropped it in the trash can. “Someone’s just fucking with us. All we have to do is find a couple of revenants with no tongues.” Then she wrinkled up her nose, “unless they’ve grown back. I don’t know, I don’t care, we can just find some revenants to shoot.”

“Wynonna,” Dolls said. He was summoning authority out of thin air. Even if he didn’t have his own agenda for the day, Doc simply did not feel up to the task of following Wynonna Earp on a madman’s mission. 

He had a vision for his day that involved more liquor than food, and he had every intention of excusing himself to make that dream a reality. “It seems that you have other tasks that require your attention,” Doc said.

Wynonna pouted, and Dolls glared at him, but all the same Doc took his coffee and his hat and left.

\--

The revenants had scattered like cockroaches in light, leaving nothing behind but the smell of where they’d been. It was just as well that they had finally found something approaching intelligence. The whole stupid lot of them had come back from hell with less brains than they’d gone in with. 

(It was enough for any man with a reasonable plan to start thinking that maybe he was better served by switching sides. If not for the threat of being sent back to hell himself, he might have just lined up every revenant he knew and invited Wynonna for target practice.)

Still, the quiet was the same as boredom. His ears were aching for a distraction from the sounds caught inside his skull and the only thing he could hear was the whistle of a lazy wind and Willard’s muffled whimpers. Bobo didn’t have the patience for _screams_ , but it was only a matter of time before a revenant grew back his tongue. 

Willard was crying around a mouthful of old socks, tied up like turkey on a post. There might even have been words oozing out of the raw wound of his bleeding mouth. Some manner of defense about how he hadn’t executed this plan on his own. There were others that had participated and guilt had to be shared and whatever else passed for excuses to a rapist. 

Bobo was slouching in a lawn chair, flipping the last of his collection of little knives back and forth between his fingers. Willard was watching it with watery-wide eyes. He was hyperventilating with anticipation, shivering so the assortment of knife hilts sticking out of his body vibrated like porcupine quills. “I’m not angry,” Bobo said. Anger could only sustain a man as long as he could keep it stoked and burning. 

Anger was for men like Doc who had been regarded as a hero and still got fucked over by fate. Anger was for men who had been loved; for the ones who had _lost_ something they’d actually possessed.

No, Bobo didn’t have the anger of a righteous man. He didn’t have the anger of a forgotten lover. He had all the fires of hell, burning like a storm in his gut, and the _constant_ reminder that he was only one bullet from going back. He lurched forward, out of the chair and onto his feet. Willard shrieked behind the gag. 

“I’m disappointed,” he said. There wasn’t much of Willard that wasn’t full of knives, but there was a stretch of his neck that was perfectly sized to get your hand around. Bobo’s thumb dug into the bone of his shapeless jaw to push his head back against the post. He watched the wildness of his eyes, darting between Bobo’s face and the tip of the knife. “What _belongs_ to me is _mine_.”

Willard was nodding as frantically and effectively as he could with his head held in place. His bloody mumbles were hard to make out but they sounded like the agreement of a man who didn’t want his eyes cut out.

Bobo could have cut his eyes out. He could have cut him to ribbons and waited for him to grow back into one piece and done it again. But, there was such a thing as overstating a point. There was an art to leaving a taste of fear in someone’s mouth. He smiled at Willard, patted his sweating face with a gentle hand and left him tied to the pole.

Someone would slink in when Bobo wasn’t looking and cut the bastard down. Lars had the intelligence of roadkill and he regenerated so quickly it took more effort on the part of the person killing him than it took for Lars to realize he was dead. It didn’t matter who saved Willard, the point had been made.

It was just a shame that the point had become tangled up in the ownership of John Henry Holliday’s nonexistent virtue. There might have been a method of separating his anger from Willard’s actions. He could have made a speech full of growls and grandstanding about how they couldn’t go around antagonizing people.

But he’d _just_ finished threatening the morons.

And there wasn’t a single God-damned revenant left that didn’t know what he’d been doing in Henry’s trailer. That had been half the point when he’d done it; the ugly thrill of knowing that _everyone_ was going to know he’d fucked Wyatt Earp’s best friend. (It was meant to be vengeance, to fuck over a dead man the way he’d fucked over Bobo.) He’d assumed a group intelligence that was asking too much for the small minds he was surrounded with. Some perks were meant to belong to the leaders; some lines were not made to be crossed.

Bobo could tolerate almost any sort of filthy criminal that crept out of hell with a willingness to help him get out of this fucking curse, but he could _not_ tolerate a rapist. If that meant he’d convinced the whole mass of them that Doc Holliday’s ass belonged to him, well that was something he definitely could not wait to make its way back to Wynonna Earp.

\--

Doc had made a miscalculation when he’d made an enemy out of Waverly Earp. It hadn’t felt like a mistake at the time, when her interference had been _complicating_ his life in ways that didn’t need to be more complicated. But, recent events had shifted a man’s perceptions of the choices he made in haste.

Waverly Earp was too kind-hearted to be any man’s enemy, but she must have thought she was being as mean as a feral cat when she threw the balled up tent at him. She was an angel with a frown, saying something like, _even assholes need a place to sleep_.

She wasn’t much of an enemy, but she would have been a far better ally. He might even have gotten a sleeping bag out of the arrangement if he hadn’t called useless and stupid. (Although both had felt true at the time, when she had been stupid to invade Bobo’s RV park.) A tent suited him just fine since the last one had been destroyed by whatever manner of violence Bobo had enacted on Willard and his accomplices. 

A tent provided him with the pretense of shelter and that was no small comfort when he found himself staring into a lazy little fire, thinking how much happier he’d been back at the bar. The liquor had been wearing off since he’d walked out, and it was barely holding him back from the sensation of being _watched_ from every angle. Not even the gun resting across his thigh was affording him any sense of security.

“You’d be harder to find without a fire.” Bobo had not _snuck_ up because any man with such atrocious taste in footwear and an overabundance of metal jewelry could not _sneak_ anywhere. His footsteps had been as plain to hear as drumbeats and the faint click of his rings knocking together had added an unhappy punctuation to his approach. 

“Oh excuse me,” Doc said. He curled his fingers around his gun, if just to feel like he stood a chance at using it against a man who could make metal fly wherever he wanted. “I suppose I could just take my chances with the weather.”

Bobo’s grin was all meanness. The furred hem of his coat moved like the long end of dress, dancing around his legs when he walked. “Weather’s less likely to fuck you, isn’t it?”

Doc was going to shoot him. He cocked the gun as he lifted it and Bobo was positively _delighted_ to be threatened. It was an echo of that wide-eyed stare of last night, when his back hit the wall of that filthy bathroom. Doc could have shot him then, and he’d wanted to as sure as he’d ever wanted anything in his life. But he couldn’t shake off the sensation that Bobo would have _enjoyed_ it.

“Relax,” Bobo growled at him, “I took care of your problem.”

“Is that what you are calling sending me a box of body parts that I am at a loss to explain to authorities? It did not feel like a solution.” 

Bobo didn’t stop moving, he was inching around the fire as his smile got wider on his face. That manic glee was getting brighter than the fire itself. He was going to start _glowing_ in a matter of seconds, running his tongue across his mouth like he’d had some misunderstanding about the nature of their situation. Doc was tracking his every move, following him with the barrel of the gun until the bastard came to a stop at his side. “You forget how well I _know_ you, Henry.”

“I do not care for your assumptions.” 

Doc had to shift on his ass to accomodate for how _close_ Bobo had gotten; for how much closer he was _getting_. The man’s body was having a separate conversation than the words coming out of his mouth. Bobo’s knees were bending like they were giving out on him, he was slithering down to a crouch that crowded all the space between them. His face was a mockery of pity, a poor impression of an apology as he pinched two fingers on the barrel of the gun pointed at his chest and moved it aside. 

“Tell me,” said the man swallowing all the light with the nearness of his body. “You didn’t like my gift.” 

That was one hell of a line. It was wrapped up in dim light and made-up memories, just _dripping_ with sweat. Those were words you whispered into the ear of yesterday’s lover when you wanted an encore, but Bobo was looking at him with an unmasked hunger that he hadn’t done _fuck-all_ to deserve. Doc tipped his head because Bobo was so close that brimstone stink of his breath was like a fog. He tipped his head like he was giving in to something he had no intention of offering up twice. 

Bobo was like all stupid men, salivating for a second chance. His hand was overheated and rough, spread around the base of Doc’s throat like a mark of ownership. They were sharing a breath as Doc pulled the knife at his waist free from its sheath. Bobo’s skin was hot as hell at the nape of his neck, he made a sound like a man being strangled when the knife pressed against his throat. 

“If you have come here assuming some manner of payment or expression of gratitude, you are very mistaken.”

Bobo’s growl was as much a moan as it was any sound of annoyance. His hand slid around Doc’s neck. His smile cracked open to show his teeth. “You’re giving me mixed signals again, Henry. You can’t put a knife to my throat and ask me not to get turned on.” His fingers were scratching into Doc’s hair as he shrugged his free arm to roll the mountain of fur back off his shoulder. 

The knife slipped on Bobo’s skin, a bubble of blood broke through the split skin. Just enough to draw a line to mark where the knife had been. It was barely deep enough to be called a _wound_ and the sound Bobo made was nothing at all like _pain_. The bastard didn’t move _back_ from the blade, he didn’t even flick his wrist to send it flying to the side. No, he eased forward on his knees, crawling into Doc’s lap like it had been his intention from the start. 

His coat fell with a thump as he moved. The shirt he wore was as thin as old paper, ripped open at the stress lines, doing nothing but being a technicality to keep him from being naked. Bobo was pressing the knife into his own throat, holding Doc still so he could duck his head and press their mouths together. 

The touch of Bobo’s mouth on his was like a rumble, a deep earthy purr that came from the man’s chest to the pressure of his lips. His fingers were stroking Doc’s hair as his tongue ran across the seam of Doc’s mouth. 

It was always the unexpected that got a man. Always the thing you couldn’t prepare for. The heat of Bobo’s body surrounding him was a mockery of safety, and the softness of his mouth was an imitation of a lover’s touch. Doc was _aching_ for the want of both, and he’d gotten them from worse places in the past. He didn’t drop the knife but he pushed back into the kiss, let Bobo’s insistent tongue slip into his mouth. 

The hand in his hair dropped to his collarbone, the full of Bobo’s palm flattened against his chest to push him back and Doc might even have gone if it weren’t for the sharp, hot pain of the scab tearing open beneath his shirt. He jerked away for the touch and Bobo released him like a reflex. The knife clattered to the side, so it was only the two of them breathing hard and staring at the blossoming blood stain spreading through Doc’s shirt.

There was an ugly assumption hanging in the air between them, the suggestion of a question that Bobo was working out if he wanted to ask. But he pressed his thumb against the reddest part of the stain and pushed it just hard enough to make it _burn_. He was open-mouthed and staring at Doc’s face, watching to see when it hurt the most. 

Doc didn’t need any man’s pity, but he sure as hell didn’t need the pity of a creature that crept out of hell. He rolled them over with a jerk, knocked Bobo on to his back in the dirt, spread into what was left of the grass. There was no romance in their intentions toward one another; no pretense that required any sort of _tenderness_. He pulled at the buttons of his vest as Bobo worked open the catch on his belt. 

They were all motion under the open sky, pulling off any layer of clothing that kept them from what they wanted. His vest and his shirt went first. He unbuckled the holster cinched at his waist with one hand, dropped it to the side where he could retrieve it if the need arose. Bobo was wiggling out of his pants like a snake in the grass, wearing nothing at all underneath but the skin he was born with. 

That said something about a man; the willingness to go without proper undergarments. Doc wasn’t in the practice of judging his lovers, but all the same, it seemed like _exactly_ the sort of thing you’d expect from a careless man like Bobo Del Rey. 

Doc was working open the button of his jeans while Bobo was dragging his coat over get at the pockets. The bastard must have walked the whole way here, keeping himself as hot as a banked coal, thinking about what kind of treat he was going to find at the end. There was a greater insult in being a correct assumption then there was to being a coerced participant. Doc yanked his zipper down with one hand and slapped the other against Bobo’s still-spread thigh.

“Roll over.”

Bobo’s laugh was a growl. He rocked up from flat on his back to grab Doc by his split-open waistband. He dragged him forward just far enough to throw him off balance so when Doc landed, it was on his back in the very same dirt Bobo had been laying a moment ago. Bobo moved with obnoxious speed, the sort of thing that made a man’s head spin. He was laying across Doc’s body with his blunt-edged teeth digging fresh bruises over the memory of the old ones before Doc had even figured out where he landed.

There was a presumptuous hand wriggling down the front of his pants, slipping past his hardening cock to make space for itself between his thighs. 

“You have already demonstrated a deplorable lack of skill,” Doc hissed at him. He was flattening his hands on Bobo’s rounded shoulders, pushing him back as he dug his heels into the ground to push himself free from the position he was stuck in. 

“That was different,” Bobo said. His tongue was licking the length of the wound his disobedient followers had left on Doc’s skin. His knee wedged itself between Doc’s thighs. “You _weren’t_ supposed to _enjoy_ that.”

“If you imagine that to be reassuring in any manner, I regret to inform you that discovering you are an even bigger asshole than my previous estimation does not make me more likely to let you try again.” 

Bobo’s mouth was too busy mouthing at his skin to worry about coming up with an answer. His slicked back hair was standing up like a rooster’s, dancing along with the motion of his mouth nipping at Doc’s skin. His calloused palm was scratching down Doc’s side, resting at his hip above the sagging waistband of his pants. 

“ _Bobo Del Rey_.” Doc was working his elbows under his body, caught between being manhandled and searching for any weapon sharp enough to add emphasis to the point that he was not getting _fucked_ by a man who apparently got to choose when he wanted it to be good for all parties involved. 

But Bobo just pushed him flat with one hand on his chest and the other pulling free from his pants. Bobo was lapping his tongue from the bottom of Doc’s open zipper to his bellybutton, smirking the whole way. There was a wicked look to his eyes, an offer that Doc would be a damn stupid man to refuse. He dug the heel of his boot into the dirt to pull his foot free and Bobo made a sound like a laugh as he pulled the jeans off Doc’s legs. He made a space for himself between Doc’s thighs, settled on his knees with one hand folded over Doc’s hip and the other pressed to the ground to steady himself. 

It hadn’t been so long ago their positions had been reversed. He had not been given the benefit of choice, not one that had meant a God-damn thing. But here he was, laid out like a prize, with Bobo Del Rey licking his lips like he was going to _take his time_. As if he hadn’t wrapped his fingers in Doc’s hair and gagged him just to watch him suffer. A man could get caught up in feelings like that; he could get pulled under by the unfairness of an unanswered insult. Because he had gotten on his knees under the pretense of an even exchange and Bobo was crouching between his thighs of his own free will, running his tongue along the length of Doc’s cock because he was fond of the _taste_ of it. 

That must have been what Willard was salivating over when he was licking his chops in Doc’s direction. He was imagining all the things that Bobo _must_ have done, and all the ways Doc could be _bent_. 

Doc was made of old bones and no regrets, but he wasn’t made of _forgiveness_. There was a slick, willing mouth wrapped around his cock, and it was _divine_ in all the same ways it was infuriating. Because Bobo had made up whatever rules got him what he wanted. He was purring around Doc because it was what _he_ wanted, because it was a stepping stone to making a man forget. Doc’s fingers pushed through that ridiculous patch of Bobo’s hair and twisted. He cupped his hand around the back of his head with a fist in his hair and jerked up against his mouth with all the same _hatefulness_ that he had been shown.

Bobo’s body quivered from the back of his throat straight down his spine. His fingers tightened into Doc’s thigh but he didn’t pull _away_. No, he growled a sound like he’d only been _waiting_ and ran his tongue the length of Doc’s cock sliding back out of his mouth. He chased after it like a starving man, following him when he pulled back to thrust again. Bobo _did_ jerk then, a great flurry of motion as his arms shoved under Doc’s legs to pull at his hips, to pull him closer. He was a demon with a bent back, fucking his own face with Doc’s cock.

Again, and again, and _again_. Until he was snarling with a spit-slicked mouth, lips so red they were as bright as cherry skins as he lurched forward to blanket Doc’s body with his own. His mouth was back at Doc’s neck, hot-as-fire with a hoarse throat, hissing, “is that what you want? Is that _how_ you want it, _Henry_? I can give it to you however you want it.”

Bobo could give him whatever he wanted as long as he wanted Bobo’s body between his thighs. Just then, breathing so hard he couldn’t catch his breath, with his body twisted up into expert knots, he couldn’t _exactly_ remember why it was such a bad idea. 

(He remembered. Of course he did. But he just didn’t care as _much_.)

“As long as _you_ are giving,” Doc said.

“Well, I have _some_ limits,” Bobo whispered into his mouth. His knees were slipping low in the dirt, dropping his body so he could rub his dick on Doc’s body. He was too close to see properly, but there was no mistaking the shape of his smile pressed against Doc’s jaw. “Take it or leave it, Henry. I’m getting bored.”

There was no indication of boredom in the heated slip of Bobo’s cock against his belly. There was no pretense of a time requirement to how his body quivered in anticipation. Doc could have taken the whole of the night and the next day too, thinking over his thoughts about letting his man have a second try to make a good impression and Bobo would have _waited_ like the good dog he was. 

“We should not lie to one another,” Doc hissed at him.

Bobo bit the skin of his jaw like a pinch, too far up his neck to be hidden by any shirt collar. He must have reached a point where words were useless to him, because he was humming his agreement into Doc’s skin to the sound of a cap popping open. 

“Stop biting me,” Doc said. He couldn’t explain a box of tongues, he couldn’t explain the cut across his neck and he damn sure couldn’t explain the shape of Bobo’s teeth on his skin. He pulled the man by the hair, off his neck and back to his mouth. 

They kissed with justified violence. Like there was still something to be won when Doc was speared open on Bobo’s fingers. They were fighting for the sake of it, now, pretending like they didn’t have the same God-damn goal for once. He was still scraping his teeth over Bobo’s tongue like there was a point to be proved when the man was pushing the fat head of his cock in. 

He might as well been fucking a stranger for how prepared he was to end up here again. He was clawing his nails into Bobo’s skin, arching under the weight of his body just for the chance to not have to see his smug-smiling face. 

(What would _Wyatt_ think of you now? That’s what the bastard had said to him last time. And it hadn’t mattered before because it was a _business_ arrangement. But this, oh _this_ had been a free man’s choice. And _what_ would Wyatt think of that?)

Bobo was groaning against his collarbone, breathing hell-hot breath over his shivering skin. Both of his arms were caught under Doc’s thighs, doing all the work of holding him up _and_ fucking him. He didn’t slow for a second, didn’t _stop_ once he started, he moved without ceasing. “Finally,” he grit out in time with the slap of his hips against Doc’s, “shut you up.”

Doc laughed and Bobo dragged him back on his cock with a growl. He was still a moment, doing nothing but grinding his dick where he’d buried it, and then he looped a lazy fist around Doc’s cock to stroke it. 

But Bobo’s smirk was all pride, his fingers slid off Doc’s softening cock to run up the length of his belly to the little white splatters. Whatever thoughts he had filling up the inside of his skull were all caught up in the swipe of his thumb and fingers cleaning up the mess. He sucked his fingers clean without looking away from Doc’s face. 

One of them had to move first, and there was no reason it shouldn’t have been Doc. He pulled away with some intention of finding a worthwhile smoke, and Bobo just fell over into the grass. He laid there with his chest heaving and his skin glistening with sweat. 

A man deserved a moment to compose himself; even if Doc had been inclined to demand Bobo leave with greater haste, he did not presently have the energy or breath to put toward the task. He was sitting on his naked ass, enjoying a smoke while he worked on remembering how his body worked. He was sorting out the difference between good aches and bad ones, trying to remember the last time he’d felt so wholly satisfied. 

But facts remained, and Bobo was still a bastard, rolling off his back to grab his pants out of the jumble of discarded clothes.

“What should I expect to hear this,” he motioned at the worn in patch of dirt between them, “event being called? I do hope it is something more original than a _Bobo special_.”

Bobo’s answer was a growl that made his eyes glow red. He was half to his feet, pulling his jeans up his sweat-sticky legs. He was aiming for acting like he was boiling with anger (and wasn’t _that_ interesting), saying: “What they lack in creativity they make up in stupidity,” like it didn’t matter to him at all.

A man didn’t go about the task of ripping a man’s tongue out of his throat when he didn’t care. 

He picked up his shirt but didn’t bother to put it back on, he just shoved it into his back pocket. There was something knocking around his chest that he wasn’t finding the words to say. Something like that _last minute_ confession in the strip-club bathroom. A barely heard _I didn’t tell them_.

Doc was half through a smoke before Bobo was half-through getting his boots back on. He grabbed his own jeans as he got to his feet. The evening was turning cold and the fire had gotten dim from being left unattended. There was the matter of a level of uncleanliness that he was uncertain how to address. He had not exactly returned from the well with a full wardrobe and could not afford to keep misusing his shirts.

However, Bobo seemed to have a vast wardrobe and the means to replenish it as necessary. Doc pulled the shirt out of his pocket when Bobo was bent over fixing his boots. It earned him a sideways glare and the vaguest belligerent smirk. 

Bobo was shrugging on his coat when Doc threw the shirt in the fire. There was simply no way it could be used for its intended purpose again. The fire perked up with something new to eat, it was just bright enough to see how Bobo was looking at Doc’s neck. There was that look again, that snarl of something so deep it was rumbling out of the ground itself, and then it was gone. Bobo said nothing, not so much as a thank you or a fare-the-well, he just turned and walked away.

  
  



End file.
